In the past, there were known cleaning disks used in optical disk devices for the purpose of removing dirt from an optical pickup. With an optical disk device, the optical pickup and the medium do not come into contact with each other. Thus, a cleaning disk was used in which a three-dimensional object like a brush was disposed over the disk to brush away dirt (see Patent Literature 1, for example).
Meanwhile, as computers and the Internet have become increasingly pervasive in recent years, there has been an explosive increase in the amounts of data being handled, and there is a need for greater capacity of recording devices used for backup. Tape streamers that record and reproduce optical signals such as those from an optical disk to a tape-form medium are a prominent example of such large-capacity information recording and reproduction devices.